The Study of Ajax and Other Interesting Web Technologies

Blogs

Over at The Next Web blog they have put together a good resource for people wanting to learn to program. If you want to be a coder, but have no idea where to start this post will be a great help for you. The post discusses how to choose a first programming language and resources to learn about it. The post will be very helpful to anybody new to coding, but even those that code for a living may find a few things that are helpful to learn to program.

Check out the post and let us know what you found useful in the post in the comments below.

Game Closure has created some HTML5 game development tools that are getting a lot of interest. In fact Facebook and Zynga (plus many others) are interested in acquiring the company. With all of this interest in the company they have just been able to to raise $12 million which brings the startup's total of money raised up to just under $13 million.

What makes Game Closure so desirable is how fast their tools make it possible to create HTML5 games for multiple platforms. The tool can take development time form 6 months down to 6 weeks! This makes their JavaScript SDK very useful and I think we will be hearing more from them in the next couple of years.

Over at Smashing Magazine they have put together a very good post about JavaScript web drawing frameworks. The post pits Paper.js against Processing.js against Raphaël. All three frameworks allow you to do some great things in the browser through JavaScript and give you a good alternative to Flash for web animation. The frameworks are pretty close in a lot of ways, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Over at the Mashable blog, they have an interesting article on how the Goole +1 button can affect SEO. If you have a website, blog or web app and you want more people to know about it social networking share buttons are essential. They allow people to easily share content on their favorite social network(s).

According to this blog post these share buttons can have a positive affect on your sites SEO as the more times an item is shared it appears to raise its page rank. In Google with recent changes to the search that incorporate Google+ the Google +1 button appears to have a chance to make an even bigger impact to your SEO. The take away I got from this post is to try to include the Facebook, Twitter and Google +1 buttons on any sites that I want to have higher page ranks.

Over at the Mashable blog they have put together a very goo Pros and Cons list of using a cross-platform mobile app development tool. Tools such as PhoneGap make it very easy to have one HTML 5 based code base that will allow you to output native code for multiple mobile devices.

On the surface this looks like a great idea, but does it work as advertised? Well, if you avoid common pitfalls such as not considering how the user normally interacts with each device then it can be great. So, take a look at these Pros and Cons and let me know in the comments of your experience with these coding platforms.

A Kickstarter project called Code Hero is being created with the goal being to learn to create games through a game. A donation of $42 gets you a pre-order of the game and lesser donations give you sneak peeks and discounts on buying the game.

Do you think that you are a coding rockstar? Are you why they invented programming languages? Do you care to put your coding to the test?

If you do then you should check out U Suck at Coding. U Sack at Coding is mailing list that sends you programming problems that allows you to put your coding skills to the test. You can check out the first week's e-mail here.

We are seeing more and more use of HTML5, however, it is being held back largely due to the use of Internet Explorer 8. IE8 will be with us for some time because it works on Windows XP and IE9+ require at least Windows Vista.

Well, I've stumbled over some code that creates most HTML5 tags correctly in IE7 and IE8 through JavaScript.

The script is very easy to use. Just put something like the below in the head portion of your code.

HTML5 is the future of the web, although it is taking some time before all browsers have full support for it. The things that can be done with it are nothing short of amazing, especially considering how easy the code really is. Well John Esposito over at the HTMLZone (part of DZone) has written a very good HTML5 example. The example is of an interactive 3D dodecahedron. The post gives a brief overview of the code as will as all of the code that was used to create the effect.

Below is an excerpt from the post.

Thursday's CSS3 bitmaps were clever and fun, but a little counter-HTML5-cultural: the whole point of SVG, Canvas, and so forth, is that vectors are better, because simpler, than bitmaps.

Today's interactive geometric CSS3 shape is just the opposite: far more pixels than pre-rendering could possibly justify, emphatically composed of 2D surfaces, and fully animated in 3D.

As of today the NetBeans IDE 7.1 is now available for download. The new version of the IDE has support for JavaFX 2.0, CSS3, new PHP debug features and more features and enhancements. If you are a user of the Netbeans IDE then you will probably want to upgrade for the new features.

Below are the highlights of the new release according to the NetBeans web site.Release Highlights

First to Support JavaFX 2.0

UI Debugger for JavaFX and Swing

Enhanced Java Editor

WebLogic 12c and GlassFish 3.1.1

Industry leading Maven support

Git integration

Improved PHP support

New Java EE Features

You can read more about the release here or you can get the new download here.